“She’s the most complex black female lead we’ve ever seen in prime
time,” Dr. Cooper said. “You’re not getting an archetype, you’re not
getting a stereotype, you’re getting a fully fledged human being,” she
said."

"Asked whether she felt any pressure being in this unusual position, Ms.
Washington... She said in an e-mail: The question was: Are audiences ready
to have the stories that we tell on television to be more inclusive? Are
we ready for our protagonists to represent people of all different
genders and ethnicities?” "

"The other week, as the debate about the depiction of torture in "Zero
Dark Thirty" raged on, I chatted with Alex Gibney about his upcoming HBO
doc "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God" and the piece he wrote in Salon
about his issues with Kathryn Bigelow's film, which he felt
misrepresented how useful so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques"
were in finding of Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, on TV, Huck (Guillermo
Diaz), one of the main characters in Shonda Rhimes' ABC drama "Scandal,"
was accused of attempting to assassinate the President, taken to a
windowless room somewhere and tortured in an attempt to get a
confession."

"On the very same night that Vice President Joe Biden
met with entertainment industry leaders to discuss the issue of media
violence and its impact on children, ABC—the television network owned by
a company named for Walt Disney—aired an intense, explicit and bloodied
torture scene during its show Scandal," the PTC wrote in a statement Tuesday.

"Scandal's a runaway success not because it's a black show from a black writer but because it's a great show from a great writer. (Although let its inclusively be a lesson to the networks and showrunners who can't manage to employ any people of color… What's stopping you?)"